'Party of state' pegs its future on felling Harper.

Henry Srebrnik, The Calgary Herald

Is it possible that the Liberals may actually lose the election? Prime Minister Paul Martin has tried to distance himself from a decade of Liberal rule and make people forget that he was a senior minister in the government.

But might he go the way of other leaders who, upon taking office, tried to reform corrupt political machines, only to be swept away by the tides of change? Voters often punish the available messenger, not his departed predecessors. Two recent examples come to mind.

After ruling Mexico continuously for seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), seeing the writing on the wall, belatedly began instituting political changes, but were swept away by Vicente Fox, who became president in 2000.

And the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985 and tried to radically alter the Communist Party, was forced to step down in 1991. People responded with enthusiasm to his policy of "glasnost" (openness), but it did not save his regime.

It's hard to envision such an outcome in this country, though. After all, even former Tory leader Joe Clark has stated that he would prefer a Martin Liberal government to a Conservative one headed by Stephen Harper. In turn, and not surprisingly, many members of the new Conservative Party of Canada have denounced Clark as a "traitor."

But Clark can be defined in such terms only if we think of the old Progressive Conservative Party as an "opposition" party. In fact, the now defunct PCs, along with the Liberals and the New Democratic Party, all adhered to a broad policy consensus about what defines Canada. Indeed, the so-called red Tory wing was often to the left of the Liberals in its social views. All three were, to use a European term, "parties of state," that is, the ones that supported the status quo hegemony of the left-liberal, secular, redistributionist, bilingual, multicultural non-ethnic state that is Trudeauvian Canada.

They upheld the "pays legale" (legal country), referring to the state's constitutional order. The Reform (later Canadian Alliance) and Bloc Quebecois parties were the true opposition.

There has been a subtle party realignment in Canada over the past few months. Most of the old red Tories have been absorbed into the Liberal Party -- Clark's endorsement of Martin has made that clear. Some might even move all the way to the communitarian NDP.

The new Conservatives are, whether they like the label or not, an enlarged version of the Alliance, because that's how the "parties of state" will define them ideologically. Martin and NDP Leader Jack Layton have already begun doing so.

And this is also the reason Layton's attempt to paint Harper and Martin as political twins won't ring true with the electorate. In reality, Layton and Martin are on the same side of the ideological divide.

The sponsorship scandal has benefited the NDP as well as the new Conservatives and the Bloc. The Conservatives in English Canada, and the Bloc even more so in Quebec, have had the better of the anti-Liberal backlash. Since the NDP also upholds the left-liberal consensus that favours big government, it has found it harder to fight abuses of power in a public sector, rather than corporate, scandal.

In English-speaking Canada, two "parties of state," the Liberals (strengthened with the stealth-like entry of old PCs), and the NDP will face as their opponents the new Conservative Party. In francophone Quebec, one "party of state," the Liberals, will confront the other true opposition party, the Bloc.

Clearly, it is Harper the Liberals will be going after outside Quebec, in attack ads designed to define him as a danger to the country. Martin told his caucus in the last days before the House of Commons adjourned that Harper's are "not Canadian values." The Liberals have launched a website (stephenharpersaid.ca) full of Harper quotes that portray him as a right-winger with extreme views.

Is it possible Joe McCarthy didn't die in 1957 but moved up to Canada and is now working for a Liberal-friendly ad agency? With all of these difficulties, it is unlikely Harper can win. And should the Liberals retain office following the spate of scandals that have been uncovered, and given the negative campaign they have unleashed, no one could blame them for assuming that they govern Canada by divine right.

---

What do the political contours of the federal election look like?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The writ has been dropped and we're trooping to the polls June 28. Let the electoral games begin!

Is it possible that the Liberals may actually lose the election? Paul Martin has tried to distance himself from the last decade of Liberal rule and make people forget that he was a senior minister in that government.

But might he go the way of other leaders who, upon taking office, tried to reform corrupt political machines, only to be swept away by the tides of change? Voters often punish the available messenger, not his departed predecessors. Two recent historical examples come to mind.

After ruling Mexico continuously for seven decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), seeing the writing on the wall, belatedly began instituting political changes, but were swept away by current president Vicente Fox in 2000.

And the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985 and tried to radically alter the Communist Party, was forced to step down in 1991. People responded with enthusiasm to his policy of "glasnost" (openness), but it did not save his regime, and one- party rule came to an end.

It's hard to envision such an outcome in this country, though. After all, even former Tory leader Joe Clark has stated that he would prefer a Paul Martin Liberal government to a Conservative one headed by Stephen Harper. In turn, and not surprisingly, many members of the new Conservative Party of Canada, whether old Tories or Alliance partisans, have denounced Clark as a "traitor."

But Clark can be defined in such terms only if we think of the old Progressive Conservative Party as an 'opposition' party. In actual fact the now defunct PCs, along with the Liberals and the New Democratic Party, all adhered to a broad policy consensus about what defines Canada. Indeed, the so-called 'red Tory' wing was often to the left of the Liberals in its social views.

All three were, to use a European term, "parties of state," that is, the ones that supported the status quo hegemony of the left- liberal, secular, redistributionist, bilingual, multicultural non- ethnic state that is Trudeauvian Canada.

They upheld the "pays legal," a French term meaning the "legal country," referring to the state's constitutional order. The Reform (later Canadian Alliance) and Bloc Quebecois parties were the true opposition.

They might be considered representatives of the "pays reel," the "real" or "true" country that lies buried beneath the official state.

To make this distinction more clear, think of the CBC as representing the "pays legal" and hockey commentator Don Cherry as the expression of the "pays reel." If the CBC does indeed fire Don Cherry from his popular Coach's Corner perch on Hockey Night in Canada, it will be an apt example of the increasing divergence in this country between the two.

The "politically correct" and elite-driven CBC represents post- 1960s Canada, while Cherry might be termed the voice of "antediluvian" popular culture in the English-Canadian pays reel. To use another French term, Cherry represents "le Canada profonde."

So there has been a subtle party realignment in Canada over the past few months. Now, in effect, most of the old 'red Tories' have been absorbed into the Liberal Party -- Clark's endorsement of Paul Martin has made that clear. Some might even move all the way to the communitarian NDP. Clark also said he supports former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, who is contesting an Ottawa riding.

The new Conservatives are, whether they like it or not, an enlarged version of the Alliance -- because that's how the "parties of state" will define them ideologically. Clark, Martin, and NDP leader Jack Layton have already begun doing so.

And this is also the reason Layton's attempt to paint Stephen Harper and Martin as political twins won't ring true with the electorate. Because in reality, Layton and Martin are, in the final analysis, on the same side of the ideological divide.

The sponsorship scandal has benefitted the NDP as well as the new Conservatives and the Bloc, but the Conservatives in English Canada, and the Bloc even more so in Quebec, have had the better of the anti- Liberal backlash. Since the NDP also upholds the left-liberal consensus that favours big government, it has found it harder to fight abuses of power in a public-sector, rather than corporate, scandal.

In English-speaking Canada two "parties of state," the Liberals, now informally strengthened with the stealth-like entry of old Tories, and the NDP, will face as their opponents the new Conservative Party. In francophone Quebec one "party of state," the Liberals, will confront the other true opposition party, the Bloc.

Clearly, it is Harper the Liberals will be going after outside Quebec, in a campaign of 'attack ads' designed to define him as a danger to the country. The prime minister himself told his caucus in the last days before the House of Commons adjourned that Harper's values are "not Canadian values." The Liberals have launched a website (stephenharpersaid.ca) full of Harper quotes that portray him as a right-winger with extreme views.

Is it possible Joe McCarthy didn't die in 1957 but moved up to Canada and is now working for a Liberal-friendly ad agency?

With all of these difficulties, can Harper actually win? It's very unlikely. And should the Liberals retain office following the spate of scandals that have now been uncovered, and given the negative campaign they have unleashed, no one could blame them for assuming that they govern Canada by divine right.

---

Winning, and then Losing, in Iraq

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

On May 1, 2003, President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared victory in Iraq. But he forgot one thing: Beating Saddam Hussein's conventional army was only the first step. In a country full of guns and weaponry, it would be only a matter of time until the occupiers faced ever-increasing harassment in the form of guerrilla warfare.

It is clear that Bush, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and their Pentagon advisers exhibited too much hubris in March 2003 when they confidently assumed that they could fight a war quickly using high-tech "shock and awe" to break the back of Iraq's military.

They were both right and wrong. True, the Iraqi army melted away in just weeks, putting up token resistence. But, as we now realize, that was just the beginning, not the end, of America's troubles. The state apparatus in Iraq was an artificial superstructure, easily shoved aside.

But the real opposition to the U.S. occupation would come from less brittle social and religious groupings: In the case of the Sunni Arabs, it was centred within highly organized extended families and tribes, while amongst the Shi'a, legitimacy lay with the clerical establishment in the mosques.

Although Sunnis and Shi'a normally have little time for one another, a solidarity based on Iraqi nationalism and pan-Islam has surfaced as both confronted coalition forces, and also because of the powerful role of religious parties now.

The so-called "neocons," the conservative hawks who have been in the forefront of determining U.S. policy in the Middle East, had assured the White House that Iraqis would greet American troops as liberators. They were as blinded by their theoretical assumptions as were the doctrinaire Marxists who ran Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.

Though they consider themselves conservatives, the neocons are in many ways the heirs of the Wilsonian strain of optimism that has periodically shaped American foreign policy: the idea that any country can be molded into becoming a pluralistic democracy.

Too bad they appear not to have read Samuel Huntington's seminal work on The Clash of Civilizations. It provides an essential dose of political realism for those wearing ideological blinkers.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at New York University, in his new book Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, has written that America's weakness is not its need to conquer but its desire to be appreciated by the citizens whose country it invades. But invading armies and occupiers are rarely beloved, no matter how awful the suffering has been.

When the war began, Bush said to the Iraqis, "We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave." Yet Iraqis responded with widespread rebellion. Can the president still honestly believe that Iraq, as he stated on May 4, will become "a model for freedom and democracy?"

American armies are great at fighting wars, but no army is good at reconstructing a country that is composed of people who aren't terribly excited by western style constitutional democracy and tolerance. Too many Iraqis seem more interested in indigenous political forms such as Ba'athist nationalism and Shi'a theocracy than in imported norms of personal freedom and equality. Even the capture of Saddam last December made no appreciable difference.

Clearly, too few troops were assigned to Iraq after the initial victory to properly contend with further resistence. So, unable to control the Sunni triangle, especially a hotbed of resistence like Fallujah, the U.S. has assembled a Sunni Muslim militia to pacify the city. Some of the leaders of the new Fallujah Brigade had been officers in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, which was dominated by Sunni Muslims and accused of human rights abuses against Shi'a Muslims and Kurds. They even still wear their old uniforms.

The American forces have also failed to wrest Najaf away from the Mahdi Army loyal to the radical Shi'a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, refraining from mounting a full-scale invasion because its shrine is one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites.

A country unwilling to use the kind of force that would have been necessary for victory in places like Fallujah and Najaf cannot win a war against the kind of insurgency it has encountered there and had better face up to what that means.

Even a Canadian human rights advocate such as Michael Ignatieff, in his new book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, maintains that to combat terrorism, "we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war."

Iraq is not Vietnam, and the world of 2004 is a very different place than it was 40 years ago. Still, there are similarities between these two wars.

The U.S. lost in Vietnam because it was hampered by its inability to bring its superior firepower to bear on the Communist guerrillas. They could retreat across the border into safe areas in North Vietnam, off limits to American forces, and they received aid from their Chinese and Soviet allies throughout the conflict.

In Iraq, too, fighters, arms and money have been flowing into the country from neighbouring Iran, Syria, perhaps even Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Iran and Syria are certainly sympathetic to the aims of the nationalist insurgents. Bush has now imposed economic sanctions on Syria, banning all U.S. exports except for food and medicine, after long-standing complaints that Damascus was undermining U.S. efforts in Iraq.

As well, in both cases the U.S. tried to win the "hearts and minds" of the population and thus distinguished between the mass of the citizenry and the enemy--in one case the Communists, in the other the Ba'athists. No such distinctions were made in World War II: in that total war, all the inhabitants of the enemy state suffered the consequences of the decisions made by their political leaders.

Also, with the revelations that Iraqi detainees have been beaten, tortured and even killed by the American military, this war already has its own, though comparatively mild, version of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, when Marines killed some 300 civilians. That crime came to light later and helped turn public opinion against that war.

Atrocities such as these tend to occur when conventional armies find themselves confronting guerrilla forces, enemies who don't wear uniforms and don't adhere to Geneva Convention rules of engagement and treatment of soldiers. There are no definable front lines and troops can be attacked without warning by suicide bombers or by snipers who then fade into a crowd of civilians. Even if they consider themselves "freedom fighters," their methods are those of terrorists The frustration inherent in such situations may boil over and often leads to the type of abuse that was inflicted upon Iraqi prisoners by their American jailers.

Though a contrite Bush apologized on Arab television networks, and Rumsfeld testified before both houses of Congress and took full responsibility for the mess, this, predictably, did them little good among their detractors, both at home and in the Middle East. The torture and humiliation at the Abu Ghraib prison will prove to be the "tipping point" which has made the continuing American mission in Iraq untenable.

The impending defeat and eventual withdrawal of America troops from Iraq--and there is no use pretending that it isn't "really" a defeat--bodes ill for the whole project of bringing any semblance of democracy and modernity to the Arab world.

In order not to prolong the agony, the U.S. military should waste no time leaving Iraq. The exit strategy is simple: Exit!

Some will no doubt respond that a U.S. exodus will "look bad" and that "there will be a vacuum leading to civil war." But who cares if it looks bad? It will look much worse if U.S. soldiers keep getting killed for no identifiable gain and are clearly not in charge of the country.

Nor will they be able to hand over sovereignty after June 30 to any pro-American Iraqi government that will last very long. It will lack legitimacy in the eyes of Iraqis. Why not let the United Nations handle the whole mess--they have earned it!

As for civil war--yes, this may follow, given that Iraq is in some sense now a political vacuum. The Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds may fight it out for control of the country or even split it apart. Even if the first two groups are Arab nationalists, the Kurds want no part of a reunited Iraq. You can't nation-build where there is no nation to be built. But that may be the "least bad" outcome.

A worse fate for most Iraqis would be the eventual assumption of power by someone who would be a political clone of Saddam Hussein. That would make this war an even greater farce than Vietnam was.